Occupied Jerusalem: Israeli and Palestinian leaders will meet in occupied Jerusalem today to try to resolve a crisis over disputed land that has paralysed recently renewed peace negotiations, officials said on Wednesday.
The meeting between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will be their first since talks resumed earlier this month after seven years of violence.
It comes just two weeks before US President George W. Bush visits the region for the first time in his tenure, in an effort to build on momentum from a recent Mideast peace summit.
The return to the negotiating table was officially announced at that summit last month, hosted by Bush as part of his efforts to get the sides to sign a deal before he leaves office in January 2009.
Palestinians have conditioned progress in the negotiations on Israel's cancelling its plan to build 307 homes in the occupied east Jerusalem neighbourhood of Har Homa. The colonisation plan was announced immediately after the summit, and just days before negotiations officially began on December 12.
Israel insists the plan does not violate its commitment not to build in West Bank settlements because the neighbourhood is located in occupied east Jerusalem, which Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war and later annexed.
The international community has not recognised Israel's hold on that sector of the city, where Palestinians want to establish the capital of a future state.
Abbas and Olmert will meet today in an effort to resolve the issue, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said yesterday. Officials in Olmert's office confirmed the meeting. Har Homa will be a top issue on the agenda, Erekat said.
"We want to make 2009 a year of peace," Erekat said. "The [settlement expansion] kills the credibility of the peace process."
The Palestinians want Israel to declare a cessation of all colony expansion in the war-won territories of the West Bank and occupied east Jerusalem, Palestinian officials said on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive diplomatic nature of the talks.
Truce talks
The possibility of a Hamas-Israel truce was expected to be on the agenda of a meeting later yesterday between Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
Israel also hoped Barak could in his visit get Egypt to crack down on weapons smuggling into Gaza.
An influential US Congressman visiting Israel said yesterday that Egypt is "complicitous" in the smuggling and must crack down on the "intolerable" flow of the weapons into the Gaza Strip.
"And if they don't, I think it would be appropriate to condition aid to them," Senator Arlen Specter, a member of the US Senate Appropriations Committee, told reporters.
